Greetings,
It is half a year since the last "Bits from Debian GNU/Hurd porters[1]",
here is an update on the port[2].
• Installation CDs
The Debian Installer includes support for a graphical interface, CD
and DVD images are available[3]. For the impatient we also have a
ready-to-go QEMU image[4]. Make sure to read the README file in all
cases!
• GHM meeting
At the GNU Hackers Meeting in Paris in August 2011, Samuel Thibault
presented "GNU/Hurd, aka. Extensibility from the Ground" with a very
good response from the audience. Slides[5] and a video[6] from that
presentation are available.
• Wheezy release goal
Since the ftp-master meeting in July 2011, significant improvements
have been made, and a technological preview of GNU/Hurd with Wheezy,
as was made for kFreeBSD did for Squeeze, is still the target. More
information is available in the updated TODO list[7]. With respect to
package porting only a few packages are still being fetched from the
ftp://ftp.debian-ports.org site, and
the network installation images now
use the main archive.
• Archive coverage
Thanks to the efforts of various Debian/Hurd porters, the percentage of
packages built for Debian GNU/Hurd has passed 70%.
Quite a few hurd-i386 FTBFS patches are waiting for an upload, thanks
for helping us by handling them!
The remaining 30% of packages are either waiting for other packages to
become available (see [8] for a (big) graph of those relationships) or
are failing for some reason[9]; a complete list of build failures can be
found at [10].
To name some packages, we now have Iceweasel, Abiword, Gnumeric, etc.
working.
The autobuilders are keeping the pace relatively nicely, notably thanks
to a new buildd provided by Richard Braun: ironforge.sceen.net.
• Developer machines
A new, way-faster Debian porter box is provided by Richard Braun,
exodar.debian.net, immediately accessible to DDs, and accounts can be
opened to non-DD alioth members on request to [email protected]
• Hardware support
Work on the DDE layer to seamlessly integrate Linux 2.6 drivers in
userland processes is in the integration stage. Network card support
is basically working on real hardware, and the overhead is quite
low. Integration of other driver classes is also on the roadmap.
The sister project Arch Hurd has released a Live CD some time ago and
have also experimental DDE integrated to enable the use of up-to-date
GNU/Linux drivers for GNU/Hurd.
The Debian GNU/Hurd porters.
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2011/07/msg00002.html
[2] http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd
[3] http://people.debian.org/~sthibault/hurd-i386/installer/cdimage
[4] http://people.debian.org/~sthibault/hurd-i386/debian-hurd.img.tar.gz
[5] http://www.gnu.org/ghm/2011/paris/slides/samuel-thibault-hurd.pdf
[6] http://audio-video.gnu.org/video/ghm2011/Samuel_Thibault-GNU_Hurd.ogv
[7] http://wiki.debian.org/Debian_GNU/Hurd
[8] http://people.debian.org/~sthibault/graph-radial.pdf
[9] http://www.bddebian.com/~hurd-web/hurd/porting/guidelines/
[10] http://unstable.buildd.net/buildd/hurd-i386_Failed.html